National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

Raijin — a Fujitsu Primergy cluster, commissioned in 2013, and which entered production in June 2013

Fujin— a small, specialised Fujitsu Prime HPC FX10 system commissioned in March 2013.

A key characteristic of both of the production systems is their balance.

System balance is that important characteristic that provides hardware and applications scalability by requiring that crucial system parameters — such as performance of memory, the interconnect fabric, and the file system — all scale with node and aggregate processor performance.

Such balance, which is displayed in the hardware solution architected by the HPC systems team at NCI, provides the facility with strong and scalable performance, and delivers a quality user experience.

15% of NCI is available for competitive access via the National Merit Allocation scheme; UQ has an additional 7.5% available to UQ researchers; and QCIF has a further 4%.

Tinaroo

Tinaroo is a traditional high performance computing cluster. It is an SGI rackable HPC system for broad research use across UQ.

Tinaroo is focused on tightly coupled parallel jobs to undertake tasks requiring a very large number of computer cores to be applied to a given problem at the same time. It will augment FlashLite, a data-intensive supercomputer and Euramoo, a cloud-hosted virtual cluster. Together these systems will span a wide range of computational templates.

Tinaroo is a UQ HPC resource that has been co-located with QRIScloud and uses QRIScloud's identity management system to ensure interoperability with FlashLite, Euramoo and storage infrastructure. For more information, visit the Tinaroo webpage.

FlashLite

FlashLite is for data intensive applications. It supports applications that need very high performance secondary memory as well as large amounts of primary (main) memory, and optimises data movement within the machine.

Data intensive applications are neither well served by traditional supercomputers nor by modern cloud-based data centres. Conventional supercomputers maximise Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS) and inter-processor communication rates through high bandwidth and low latency networks.

Conversely, modern cloud systems minimise the cost of ownership through reliance on virtual machines and shared storage; they thus utilise relatively slow processors and networks and, by and large, do not support parallel processing.

FlashLite, however, maximises Input Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) while achieving competitive FLOPS ratings and high performance networking, producing a balanced system for applications that exploit parallelism, high-speed arithmetic, and high performance Input/Output (IO). The machine also incorporates novel software mechanisms that provide seamless access to data regardless of location, making it easier to build new data intensive applications, whilst supporting legacy codes using familiar techniques.

FlashLite has been funded by the Australian Research Council, in conjunction with the following stakeholders:

CSIRO

Griffith University

Monash University

Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation

Queensland University of Technology

The University of Queensland

The University of Technology, Sydney.

Users from the stakeholder organisations will need to make a case for needing a machine with the capability of FlashLite.

Euramoo

Built on the Nectar cloud, Euramoo is optimised for multiple serial jobs as opposed to large parallel ones. It will support shared memory (OpenMP) style programs as well as small footprint, low network bandwidth message passing (MPI/MPICH) workloads. It is ideally suited to large parameter sweep or ensemble applications.

Euramoo will offer a very flexible platform because more cores from QRIScloud can be added to it as demand increases and as cores are made available. Euramoo will support the Nimrod parameter sweep and workflow tools, providing additional capacity to this powerful high-level computational environment. For more information, visit the Euramoo webpage.

MASSIVE

The Multi-modal Australian Sciences Imaging and Visualisation Environment (MASSIVE) will be the primary Australian high performance computing facility for computational imaging and visualisation.

The MASSIVE facility provides the hardware, software and expertise to help researchers apply advanced imaging and visualisation techniques across a wide range of scientific fields. It provides scientists an unprecedented view of captured data and simulated models by providing the capability to view full resolution datasets.

MASSIVE was formed by the Australian Synchrotron, CSIRO, Monash University and VPAC, with funding from the State Government of Victoria and National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).

MASSIVE comprises two separate installations, one at the Synchrotron and the other at Monash University — both in Melbourne. These two interconnected computers operate at more than 5 and 30 teraflops, using traditional CPUs and GPUs.

QRIScloud

QCIF operates the Queensland node of both the Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project and the national research cloud provided by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) project

The Queensland node is called QRIScloud, and its main data centre is currently located at The University of Queensland’s St Lucia Campus.

QRIScloud is an integral part of new, national research infrastructure; combining data collections stored in local and national RDSI nodes, with access to Queensland-based HPC facilities and specialised cloud data services.

Computationally, QRIScloud currently offers around 4,000 cores.

UQ researchers can apply for access to a number of virtual machines through QCIF.